Someone, probably one of my aunts, bought Dr. Reuben’s book when it came out in paperback, and when my grandfather found out he banished it to the attic. Why he didn’t throw it out I don’t know, but I found it there when I was about eleven years old and immediately read it from cover to cover.
         It wasn’t until years later that I began to realize how bad most of it was. Recently I looked through an issue of Playboy from the month I was born and I found a long article by Betty Rollin just demolishing everything about the book. So even at the time, lots of people knew it was nonsense.
         Still, the damage had been done, to me at least. I grew up with weird ideas about gay people, and prostitutes, and the female orgasm, and consent, and milk for some reason.
         I’m looking at the book right now. I have it on my dining room table sitting next to Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, a book I stole from the public library when I was thirteen. Everything I knew about hippies I learned from that book. Both paperbacks have lurid yellow covers and insistent title fonts. When I set them side by side like this, I can imagine them talking to each other, sharing secrets and harmful advice. I imagine my preteen self whispering to these books, I am curious, yellows.
         Sometimes I glance over my bookshelves, which contain much of a lifetime of my own reading, and I mentally sort the authors into categories: narcissist, racist, alcoholic, junkie, rapist, anti-Semite, fraud, charlatan, abuser, criminal, murderer, nazi. William S. Burroughs shot his wife. Rimbaud smuggled slaves and ivory. Alice Walker and her lizard people. Ezra Pound, my God. These are the men (and less often, women), who have formed my mind. I look at these books, and I imagine multiplying them a million million times, until I have a bookshelf the size of the world, and then I imagine a million billion mindless termites eating their way through it all, chewing away at any wisdom or goodness or compassion or human dignity, leaving behind just the ugliness to be preserved for future generations. That’s my vision of the future and I think it’s coming true. Sometimes I think it would be better if everybody forgot everything.
         I masturbate, and ejaculate clotted curds of cum onto the cover of Dr. Reuben’s book. Something is crawling around in my head so I smack myself and smack myself again until I dislodge a few termites from my ear, where they have crawled after hatching in the rottenest areas of my brain. They fly. I watch them circle each other in the air, then drop down to land in my spunk, and their wings yank off and they begin to mate—and with my notepad and pencil I document it all.
♂♀